The pressure to do more with less in this downturned economy and the trend toward storage consolidation are working together to create a heightened interest in storage management software.
But, says Carolyn DiCenzo, chief analyst for Gartner Dataquest's Storage Management Software and SAN Appliances research group: "The cost of managing the storage resource continues to represent a bigger number than the cost of the storage resource itself."
Sun Microsystems is showing just how serious the company is about storage resource management (SRM) software with its latest announcement of its SRM version.
"The addition of global management and database management tools to the Sun HighGround SRM offering will expand the customer view into the storage resources, providing more information to better manage the environment," says DiCenzo.
Stefano Mattiello, managing director of Sun Microsystems SA, says Sun is "leveraging the strengths of our HighGround product road map for full customer benefit. Through Sun HighGround SRM 5.0, we're broadening the reach of the SRM product line to include support for the most highly-valued data in the enterprise, that is Oracle and Sybase databases."
Sun HighGround Storage Resource Manager (SRM) Version 5.0 delivers improved application uptime and return on investment to both Oracle and Sybase customers. The new software builds on Sun's Web-based storage resource management application that provides IT managers with critical utilisation, consumption and availability data about their enterprise storage.
In addition to now incorporating Oracle and Sybase database storage resources, the new software provides consolidated views and alerts of global servers, making it even easier and more effective for Sun's customers.
"Over half the storage within corporations today consists of databases for mission-critical applications," comments Mattiello. "By implementing Sun HighGround SRM Version 5.0, Sun's customers have a centralised view of these distributed databases. As a result of improved capacity management and planning, customers gain greater efficiencies, enhanced service levels, and a greater return on investment.
"Companies today need to do more with less budget," adds Mattiello. "With our new software, we give them the tools to do just that. With Sun HighGround SRM software, they know what they need, and when they'll need more. This gives them a scalable approach to managing storage growth while improving their return on investment."
"Storage capacity shortages are one of the leading causes of unplanned downtime," says Doug Kennedy, vice president, Global Partnerships, Oracle Corporation. "Customers with fast growing databases are the most likely to experience this downtime, and could clearly benefit from the automated monitoring and alerting the Sun HighGround SRM software offers."
"By managing actual database storage use, Sun HighGround SRM helps achieve more efficient utilisation of existing storage and provides the tools for orderly, planned capacity expansion", says Bill North, director of research for IDC's storage software service. "Its centralised view of enterprise-wide storage allows DBAs to deliver higher database service levels accompanied by improved management efficiency and reduced storage acquisition costs."
Sun's HighGround SRM software helps customers identify under utilised storage resources, databases that are candidates for SAN (storage area network) migration, and opportunities for server and storage consolidation.
While each instance of Sun HighGround SRM provides a central view of distributed storage statistic reports, the global reporting option is a solution that unifies and centralises the data collected from multiple servers and thereby helps enable global IT organisations to monitor storage service levels and quality of service in addition to being able to track enterprise-wide storage growth trends.
"Global reporting can be particularly useful in storage operation centres that are chartered to monitor and manage a wide range of shared enterprise systems and data to help ensure availability and quality of service across a global enterprise," comments Mattiello.
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Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- The Network Is The Computer -- has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that power the Internet and allow companies worldwide to take their businesses to the nth. Sun can be found in more than 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://www.sun.com.
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